FLBA stands for Federated League of Basketball Association and it’s a project 3 years in the making.
NBA Live and 2k have always been a part of my life, dating way back to 2003 when I got my first NBA game for the Playstation 2:
NBA Live 2004 with Vince Carter on the cover and Right Thurr and Ghetto Musick on the soundtrack.
From then on, I’ve played nearly all of the NBA game developers have to offer.
After so many years playing, I got pretty tired of playing as the same NBA players past and present. I love playing the game, but it became quite dull after so many replays and seeing all the same familiar faces repeatedly for 20 years, so I started adding my own custom players to the MyNBA modes I’d play in NBA 2k19.
I’d start up a season with a mishmash of current and classic teams, but with a little twist of created players thrown in the mix. That was entertaining for a while, but I’d still get bored watching Allen Iverson, Vince Carter, Lebron James, Ray Allen, and Shaq doing the same things I’ve been watching them do since I was a child.
The new created players were a fresh change of pace, but it wasn’t enough.
I needed more.
With each subsequent new save I’d start up, my roster of created players grew steadily. It grew to the point where I had a handful of teams that were sporting 3+ created players. I invited my brother to join in on the fun and he made his own players as well to play as. We each made players and locked our controllers to them so we could only control them and not the entire team.
He was Peter John Lemon Jr. in the West and I was Jimmy Jok in the East.
We would simulate the season and the first round of playoffs, play a couple games of the Conference Semifinals and Conference Finals before we would hopefully meet each other in The Finals. We’d grown so invested in our characters because we were them and they were us.
We clashed in The Finals 3 seasons in a row, with roster updates and character changes over the intervening offseasons. I can’t remember the exact outcomes of each year, but I do remember that one season he got injured in closeout Game 6 of the Conference Finals and missed the entire Finals because of it and then I got injured in Game 1 of the Finals another year and couldn’t recover either.
It was so much fun to see these teams of ours that were entirely customized, full with characters of our own imagination, duking it out right in front of us on the biggest virtual stage there is in the sport.
Once I got a taste of that fresh experience, all hope of returning to a normal NBA league, playing as the same players we watch on TV, had vanished entirely.
So, when NBA 2k22 came out, I got started on building the FLBA.
I didn’t know what I wanted out of it exactly or how to do it entirely but I just hit the ground running and experimented as I went. After several months tinkering with the MyNBA game mode and roster/player editing, I managed to build an entire roster of 500+ players of my own creation and 30 custom teams. By the time I finished building the league, NBA 2k23 was already out and I knew that my days producing the FLBA on NBA 2k22 and on the Xbox One were numbered.
I went on to play that FLBA save and streamed it for a few months to friends who were in on the project, but the whole time I knew that I would have to move on to the next gen version of the game before long and rebuild it there when I got a chance. Because of that realization, I didn’t dedicate all of my creative energy to producing the project on NBA 2k22. Instead, I played the game and played around with things like live tickers at the bottom of the screen and different social media templates to post on Instagram and Facebook. When playing around with the league, I made note of its pitfalls so I could build it even better once I got the opportunity, maintaining a gameplan for what to do once I got my hands on a next gen console and NBA 2k24.
Well, the time has come.
I’ve got a PS5, I’ve got NBA 2k24, and I’ve got my roster built and ready to go.
For now, I’ll be streaming myself playing through our first season, which starts with the 1983-1984 season, and editing that content to post onto YouTube in chapters.
I’ve got very big plans for this project that go far beyond just sharing my gameplay, so please stay tuned to this page and subscribe to my mailing list so you can stay up to date with what we create.
Thank you so much for reading this and I hope you have as much fun as I do with the FLBA.
F L B A
it’s more than basketball
Federated League of Basketball Association 